SAN FRANCISCO – L3Harris Technologies will help the U.S. Defense Department extract information and insight from satellite and airborne imagery under a three-year U.S. Army Research Laboratory contract.
L3Harris will develop and demonstrate an artificial intelligence-machine learning interface for Defense Department applications under the multimillion-dollar contract announced Oct. 26.
“L3Harris will assist the Department of Defense with the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities and technologies,” Stacey Casella, general manager for L3Harris’ Geospatial Processing and Analytics business, told SpaceNews. L3Harris will help the Defense Department embed artificial intelligence and machine learning in its workflows “to ultimately accelerate our ability to extract usable intelligence from the pretty expansive set of remotely sensed data that we have available today from spaceborne and airborne assets,” she added.
For years, defense and intelligence officials have sought ways to take advantage of artificial intelligence and machine learning tools companies are developing to help make sense of the ever-expanding flood of data.
The Defense Department “has certainly made a lot of progress in ingesting and integrating artificial intelligence capabilities,” Casella said. “That next stage is enabling the speed and scale along with it.”
Meanwhile, sensors continue to gather more data and imagery.
“There’s so much remotely sensed data that has been collected and that will be collected in the future, spanning different types of imaging modalities, phenomenologies and timeframes,” Casella said. “The challenge is pulling all the data together in a usable format so that we can extract actionable intelligence.”
